Time to U1: 3 months
Time to U2: 1 month
Time to U3: 3 weeks (!?)

You guys are bangin.

@Seifer omg this changelog tho … it’s almost like a major release!

https://www.falcon-bms.com/changelogs/falcon-bms-4-36-update-1/

new training missions? new cockpit textures? new/improved AI and JTAC interactions?

improved ACMI recording? improved models? and docs? the list just goes on…

I was only expecting a few CTD fixes and maybe the AIM-120 thing.

this is amazing work, BMS team, in just a few short months! can’t wait to try it out…

@chihirobelmo forget the code, I think many of us are excited to see that you’re a member of the dev team now!

I have no vote for or against Steam integration but I want to take a moment to acknowledge the huge changes BMS has already undertaken, in the past 12 months, to reduce the barrier(s) to entry and increase visibility.

• easy downloader and updater – no more bittorrent! no more needing to maintain a setup/staging folder for updates!

• much easier to sign on to the new forum… better search features, and also google indexing of threads!

• integration of Alt Launcher (which has caused added confusion in the near term, for some old timers, but still must admit it is a huge net win for newb-friendliness)

• the recent, huge overhaul of virtually all the main docs

• dozens of new youtube videos, incl from the devs and doc authors

• lots of under-the-hood improvements to make the code work better, by default, out of the box, for a wider variety of modern desktop systems… sometimes little things, like making borderless-mode the default, go a long way to removing technical barriers and reducing confusion

• release cadence brought down from ~3 years to ~3 months to ~3 weeks!

Yes, true it’s still not anything like a one-click Steam download or a retail, shrink-wrapped software experience… but it has moved so far in that direction, over the past year… certainly more than I ever thought it would.

@D3m1aN the Parthenon is modeled?! that’s astounding!

my new desktop wallpaper…

(@ 1:30)

“Falcon BMS - As Legit as it Gets”

Congrats, BMS team!

tip 1- long-press Uncage in AG mode, to switch to STRF.

tip 2- small controlled bursts… think of it as a shotgun, not a machine-gun.

tip 3- I never knew this until I saw it on someone’s youtube video… the TGP will go into a “CCIP” mode focusing on the area of projected impact.

The MFD will refuse to become SOI so it helps to get your preferred zoom factor dialed in, before switching to STRF. (I think I like 2x wide fov … but ymmv)

The TGP is a game-changer!

bonus tip 4- have a good, long-lasting flare program… like 1/sec for 12 sec (or longer). angry people are going to be shooting manpads at you.

the bullets in BMS appear to “time out” after ~2.5nm range… so it seems not possible to spray downward from 20k ft, staying out of manpad and shilka range

@bjjman94 said in Aim120:

It’s range is 57nmi

If a Tu-160 blackjack bomber is screaming straight toward you at mach 2.3 and does not maneuver at all… and you are screaming straight toward it at mach 1.2… and both of you are at 35k ft or higher… and you fire the missile at optimal loft trajectory when the blackjack is 56.51 mi away… and you work for Raytheon and your job title is Marketing Manager… then you might reasonably say the AIM-120C range is 57 mi.

@digle said in Small EOY update...:

Is there a reason about this short period of time between releases since 4.35 ?
Remember 4.33 took several years to be debugged
New debugging tools ? Change of the software architecture ?

I’m not a BMS dev so folks can correct me if I’m wrong. Just looking from the outside, I saw a few new tools, and things happen since 2020… beyond the inside-baseball stuff Seifer outlined.

• the move to x64 only, and end of life for Win7 (and soon Win8) reduces the test-matrix by a lot

• I think in mid 2021 (sometime early/mid 4.35 era), the dev team started using AppVerifier [1] to catch mem leaks, double-free bugs, and heap buffer-overruns … uncaught SEH exceptions, etc. and other related tricks eg. /GZ or /RTC compiler flag, for debug-builds, to catch stack buffer-overruns.

One can imagine there was probably a huge logjam of noise in those initial reports… imagine 20 years of accumulated bugs (and starting out with a lot, lol)! But through heroic efforts of Seifer and other devs, once the random noise of dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of nondeterministic CTD bugs is squashed… at some point you begin to cross an inflection point, enjoying increased velocity in all other aspects of development and testing.
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/devtest/application-verifier

• maybe increased use of smart-pointers? I haven’t seen the code, so this is entirely heresay, but it sounds to me like some of the coding style/guidelines have matured from “1998 game-dev C++” to … well at least “2008 C++”, lol. maybe just for newer code, at least?

Definitely the hardest part of C/C++ development is enforcing clear lifecycle-ownership of memory and other resources (network connections, file handles, COM objects, etc)… C++ smart-pointers, combined with RAII [2] mindset, is the best “tool” I know of to tackle that.
[2] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/raii

• Divide and conquer: increased reliance on external, community-driven features like Alt Launcher, WDP and TacView etc, helps keep BMS priorities focused on the core sim engine.

Those things were there before 4.35, but it seems like a clear change in strategy to embrace them, as loosely coupled dependencies. (eg. the default ACMI format no longer compat with the builtin playback feature.)

@Atlas My tips …

1. approach at an offset … eg. 500 ft off the left wing. so you can get a sense of the tanker moving “backward” in your fov as you approach

2. set g_fSmartScalingThreshold 3.0 //nautical miles

the idea here is to have things scale smoothly, within gun range (~3.0 nm) and also for flying formations, overhead-break and carrier landing patterns etc

@mack97 it’s a silly close cluster of ballistic missile launchers… it’s mostly secondary explosions

the training manual makes a little joke about it, iirc

@tdr it is saying “file not found” trying to launch the BMS exe

I can see, something is really messed up with your install … I don’t know the cause, but from the screenshot on your other thread it looks like you’ve been moving stuff around?

https://forum.falcon-bms.com/post/386662

where is Alt Launcher even in that screenshot? where are you running it from? what is that ‘logs’ folder? I have no idea what I’m seeing there … your ‘Launcher’ directory should look like

the only course of action I can advise, is to backup any User/Config and re-install BMS … there’s no way I can help troubleshoot a file-not-found error, when stuff has been moved around.

@tdr any new bugs, like this one, are my fault not chihiro’s…

can you open %LocalAppData%\Benchmark_Sims\Launcher_Log.txt and share it via https://pastebin.com ?

(hit Start and paste in that path, hit enter – it should open in Notepad or your favorite text editor)

a 4070 Ti is about US$750

I would maybe disassemble and clean my 1080… reapply fresh thermal-paste, if it’s been more than 5 years – be very certain that it’s a part in need of replacement.

for about half that price, you could keep the 1080 and replace everything else … CPU, RAM, mobo and SSD

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/xPXyqm

[Edit: I don’t actually own any of those parts, so not an endorsement… but… now I’m asking myself, why not? tis the season for PC upgrades! lol]

to get a sense of whether/how CPU-bound you are … turn on the FPS metrics in game… (hit [alt+C] then [F])

the key metrics to focus on are the “Draw” and “Exec” timings… if these stay well below 16ms, you should be able to achieve consistent 60 fps without being CPU-bottlenecked

@m1tp2king what FPS are you hoping for, at 4k?

my 3060 Ti does well for single-monitor 4k at 60hz … overall GPU utilization (at max freq) is about 40%

on paper, it’s only about 33% faster than your 1080 so … not sure you would gain much with the upgrade.

1080 is a “Maxwell” generation part, which should support HAGS (hardware-assisted graphics scheduler) in Win10 … and you do almost certainly want to make use of that, with older CPU.

your older CPU/BIOS chipset likely won’t support Resizable-BAR … which became a thing in the Nvidia 30-series iirc. but I don’t think that matters for BMS.

@Mikyjax there are definitely some discrepancies vs what’s described in the -34 manuals … but some of the description in the -34 seems is a little unclear or contradictory as well. definitely something to look into further.

@danidr there were some similar reports of crashing loading models or textures, on Linux/Wine … you can find the threads here, I forget but I think they found a workaround (a specific version of Wine or some particular config)…

@ravenlost that could very well be the problem.

I’ll do some clean-box testing of the installers…

which installer were you using?

@SoBad that is astonishing – Seifer’s debugging skills are off the charts. (I looked at the dmp too but can’t say how long it would have taken me to spot that, or if I ever would have)

what speed RAM is it? just curious…

for Ryzen 7700X, looks like 2x sticks of DDR5-5200 are recommended for optimum speed + reliability. life too short to worry about RAM errors!

https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-7700x